This Startup Shares The Salary Of Every Employee Online, Including The CEO

Financial information is kept under close guard for most startups, but that’s clearly not the case at social media startup Buffer.

In a post on Buffer’s Open blog, CEO Joel Gascoigne reveals his salary along with the salary of every single employee in the company, and includes the formula the company uses to get to each one.

“One of the highest values we have at Buffer is Transparency,” Gascoigne writes. “We do quite a number of things internally and externally in line with this value. Transparency breeds trust, and that’s one of the key reasons for us to place such a high importance on it.”

Gascoigne, who has a salary of $US158,800, revealed the exact formula Buffer uses to get to that number: Salary = job type X seniority X experience + location (+ $US10K if salary choice).

His $US75,000 starting base salary for an executive officer level job gets a boost for seniority, experience, and location (he’s in San Francisco). That works out to the following: $US158,800 (75k Executive Officer base + 20%, + 12k/$m revenue, 1.2X, +22k,).

It’s an interesting bid for transparency — especially on the mostly-taboo subject of what everyone’s getting paid. But it’s all in keeping with the company’s cultural “default to transparency.”